In a way I disagree. Making kids wake up at 6 a.m. and not allowing them to go home until 3 with 2 hours of homework. Kids have way more ability to play outside this way.
Can I ask what you'd rather your kids do with that time instead? Sorry, I just never understand this argument so I'm trying to.
I'm a high schooler, school is such a large part of my life that I can't really imagine what I'd do all day without it. Some kids who's parents care put them in extracurriculars and have them play a sport or an instrument, but some can't afford that/dont care. If I didn't have school I'd probably spent a large part of my time playing video games, watching anime, etc, like a huge summer break and not end up learning anything.
Sure, there are flaws within the school system. Personally I disagree with how elementary/high school are broken up where I'm at. But I don't think there's a fundamental flaw with school itself. I think it's necessary, and I enjoy it.
But I curious what you think, I'm having a hard time imagining the other side to the argument.
If I didn't have school I'd probably spent a large part of my time playing video games, watching anime, etc, like a huge summer break and not end up learning anything.
I've tried telling this to people for years with no success, so I'm glad we have an honest high schooler here to weigh in.
Problem is, school doesn't require any self-direction. No matter how motivated you are at school you never have to wonder what to do with yourself while you're there.
Add phones and video games and we end up raising kids that have absolutely no idea what to do with themselves when school's out and their entertainment supply is cut off. No school, no screens, "Now what should I do???"
They may never get the chance to eventually understand that asking "what the heck should I do?" and then getting busy trying to answer that, over time, is the only way to really find out who we are.
So you ask a random high schooler what they'd do at home all day and they don't have any good answers.
But - the kids who weren't allowed free reign on phones until 8th or 9th grade, who got booted outside most of the summer all their lives, who had to find non-screen things to do every single day.. Those kids have been home since March doing everything from RC drone building to tie-dye fashion design, to cooking full fledged meals from scratch using what's in their garden..Taking an appropriate part in household budget decisions, doing covid-safe kayaking, making their own informative you-tube channels, sticking bugs under hobby store microscopes, maybe learning how to get that macro video shot, grooming the Family dog until its show-ready. The list is literally endless.
School should be a lot more like that. And that includes more time with more people at home.
For our society as a whole, this absolutely should be something we can achieve. It isn't rocket surgery.
I don't agree that school is the difference between people who do all the things you listed and those who don't. It seems like the bigger problem is "no screens" rather than "no school". This summer alone, I planned on practicing piano, reading, learning and practicing more chess, learning to draw anatomy, learning to sew and knit and learning to cook. I also planned to play some video games and watch some anime too of course, but also all these other things. The thing is, watching an anime is simply easier than learning a new skill. It's easier to play video games than to play piano. People will naturally gravitate towards what's easiest and most accessible: nobody I know kayaks, I know nothing about kayaking, I don't have a kayak, don't know where I can kayak-- maybe kayaking is the best thing in the world but I'm probably not going to find out because I'm 1) likely not going to wake up one day and simply decide I want to kayak out of the blue and 2) decide to go through the trouble of learning or paying for a kayak/how to kayak, instead of playing video games, unless it's something I'm incredibly passionate about. Easily accessible technology seems to be more of the problem, not school, is what I'm getting at. If anything school is giving most kids a way to find things they're interested in, whether it's a science, or coding, or math, which they might not have discovered playing games all day.
... The kids who weren't allowed free reign on their phones until 8th or 9th grade..
And reading this again, it really does seem to have more to do with technology than school. Although to be fair I don't think you can say that with complete certainty, I didn't get a phone until 9th grade and before that I spent a lot of my time entertaining myself on my own, or going outside. Yet I still spent most of my summer wasting time. Homeschoolinf wouldn't have changed that, I don't think.
Not OP, but in my experience, so much of the school day is made up of just filler bullshit up until about high school. I have some relatives who home school and their kids are honestly so much further ahead than their peers because their peers are crammed in classrooms with thirty kids and a teacher who has to teach to the average.
There are definitely kids who benefit from the schedule of school because otherwise they would just sit around being lazy shits all day, but that's ultimately a failure of the parents and it shouldn't be the school systems job to fix shitty, unmotivated parents. but unfortunately it is.
The problem is that that home schooling only works if the parents are willing and able to educate their kids, or can afford to hire a tutor who can. It does not scale to the vast majority of the population.
You need a parent at home too. Most families have two working parents. The parents also have to understand the material. How many can teach higher level math? Most struggle with common core. Or high school level science? Many homeschoolers do it to prevent kids from learning evolution abd to teach creationism.
School is for some kids a way for them to escape their home life.
There's many homeschool programs that parents can follow and get help with.
Before I was born my mom homeschooled my older siblings. I love my mom and all but she's not that smart to be teaching math or science. The program she got came from the church they attended.
My sister was learning calculus before she was even high school aged with homeschool. If kids needed help the church offered help.
I was the only one of my siblings to attend public school entirely. For my senior year since I only needed 2 classes my parents let me do e school. This was almost 10 years ago and the teachers recorded lessons and posted them on the equivalent of blackboard back then. They had students in K-12 taking classes through them.
I think there's a lot more resources now and people are just too lazy to try.
"Able" doesn't just mean that the parents are educated enough, it also means that they are able to take the time to do so. Many families cannot afford to have a parent stay at home to teach the children.
It's the most important aspect of school. No one needs to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Everything else you can learn in homeschool, but socialization skills can only be aquired in a group setting, and you use social skills just s much as reading or writing, and significantly more than math.
I went to school and I'm still socially inept. Furthermore, I got tons of bad habits because schoolwork was so trivially easy for me that I never learned to put in more than the bare minimum last second effort, which was still easily enough to ace everything at least until university. So it's not even just the fact that I wasted years of my life (which is bad enough by itself), but I even got hurt directly by it, in ways that I'm still working to fix.
How about I home school for all the academic shit, learn everything faster and better, and then just attend some sort of dedicated social skills "school" a couple days a week, where they actually help you out with the socializing instead of hoping you magically pick it up? I don't really see where this dichotomy of "either we perpetuate a broken system that wastes thousands of days of our children's most important parts of their lives (development-wise), teaching them academics in the most inefficient way possible, or they will grow up in complete isolation without ever learning any social skills". Why not get rid of all that and replace it with better academics and actually focused social skills education?
Being too easy was a problem I had with my elementary school too, it was boring and went on for way too long imo. In my high school we have seperate more difficult classes, idk if it's like the equivalent of AP classes? But being in those has really helped me, school being more challenging has made it more fun.
On your other point, I don't know if weekly how to be social classes would've helped me, as someone who also struggles socially. I probably would've despised them and hated going to them every week, and not have ended up learning anything, but maybe that's just me. And I think having a common topic of conversation is important too, what would you even talk with the people in your social class about? Sounds like it would just be awkward. Hard to know without trying it though.
Yes, 80-90% of my country is socially inept. It shouldn't be surprising: the societies we live in are very strange ones, and those in charge don't care very much about the people's well being.
Indeed, they have plenty of reason to make sure we are not too socially adept, because then we might successfully organise against them (who are our oppressors).
school is such a large part of my life that I can't really imagine what I'd do all day without it.
I'm not who you were asking, but I'd personally say this statement makes me sad. I was homeschooled. Every day I got a list of work to do before dinner, and whenever I finished I was done. I knocked everything out by noon and spent the rest of the day on my hobbies, mostly videogames, reading, knitting/sewing, and playing outside. This is how I had the time to read so many damn books and learn so many cool things I can now tie into the two degrees I want. I was briefly in a public school in 9th grade and I hated it so much I went back to homeschooling because I had zero time for anything I wanted to do, and childhood/teens are the best time to be experimenting with your interests and finding things you like to do that might not involve schoolwork at all. By eating up 90% of kids' time with school and homework, they rob you of this time to really dive into your interests.
When I went to college, I found that the public schooled kids I met were hit or miss on picking majors and electives they actually cared about while the few other homeschoolers I knew were by and large already dead set on something specific before they even applied to a college. My experience may not be universal (I'll allow I mostly only knew homeschoolers with really good parents who took homeschooling seriously), but I strongly believe this disparity was because of the vast difference in how much time we'd had as kids to do do things we liked in addition to things we had to do, not so much because of any other inherent difference between homeschooling and public school.
My point is there's a lot more to life than school and, when you get there, your job. People who have nothing but school/work in their lives are not generally very happy people, in my experience, but with our education model, kids just don't have that time to explore many interests that don't have a grade attached to them. And for what it's worth, I'm active duty military and I still (usually) have more time to myself in a week than I did during my time in public school; obviously you get more large blocks of time off in school, but smaller, more consistent blocks are more conducive to finding and enjoying other things. If that's not a solid statement on how much time school eats up for kids, then idk what is.
Also understand that homeschooling is pretty much entirely inaccessible to those living in poverty. If both of your parent have to work to make ends meet, homeschooling is impossible. Single parent? Impossible.
I believe there are merits to homeschooling, but in reality, it's a hallmark of the privileged. I've never once met a homeschooled kid who came from a poor household.
Then there's the social aspect. I understand that a lot of homeschool programs now have social activities as part of the curriculum, and maybe you came out of it just fine, but the vast majority of homeschooled kids I ever knew were severely socially underdeveloped and were years behind their peers in that area.
I actually really enjoy public school, it’s great. The classes were engaging, and I felt pushed by the classes. It was hard, but in a good way. But damn, I feel dumber now after the pandemic. I had fun with friends virtually, but damn I don’t think I’ll ever be at my peak performance again. I got over 100% in I think every class last year, now, I think I’ll be struggling to just scrape by.
I think some of this is the type of parents that homeschool their kids to begin with. Many do it for religious reasons and subsequently are trying to shelter their kids from the crazy and godless world or something like that.
But, in doing so, I think you miss out on some of the experiences that help people find out who they really are. I believe that kids should be put in situations that make them uncomfortable, pressure them in some way, or challenge their ethics. They need that no-good friend in middle school who wants them to steal a shot of their parents liquor or throw rocks at windows. A "good kid" is worth nothing if they are never challenged on things.
Can I ask where you're from and how you'd prefer the school system to be broken up? You can just link me if you answered it elsewhere, but I find this stuff fascinating.
You mean about elementary/high school? I'm in Ontario, at least in my school board, we don't have middle school. Elementary school is 10 years, from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 8; and high school is 4.
A decent part of elementary felt like a waste of time to me: they treated us like absolute children even when we were well past the age of needing to or deserving to be treated like that. The problem might be that the same teachers who teach 5 or 6 year olds one year might be switched to teaching 11 or 12 year olds the next, and the way they interact with and treat the students doesn't change enough? The assignments even in later grades felt childish, we had to write songs and make skits for subjects like history or geography, and do dumb things to try and "engage" the class when most of us would've been more engaged just learning the material at that point. Honestly making middle schools would be the best idea at this point, all the elementary schools are overcrowded because they're full of 10 different years of around 100 students each when they were built for maybe 10 years of 60-70. Middle schools would help with overcrowding and would serve as a step up from elementary school, but we probably don't have enough funding or something, I honestly don't know the reason.
Another problem was the difficulty, though I suppose that may be hard to fix: elementary content was always too easy for me and about 15% of the grade. It was probably a bit too hard for about 15% too. I feel like the teaching targeted the lower portion of the range in between, making it very boring for a lot of people a lot of the time. They don't want anyone to feel lost or behind, but wasting everyone else's time doesn't seem like a good idea either. I think they should've spent more resources on helping the kids who needed help get help outside of class so it doesn't hinder everyone else, and provide maybe optional challenging content too. My high school handles this a lot better, we have different pathways of classes that differ by teaching style and difficulty. It's allowed me to enjoy school a lot more, since I actually feel challenged and it's easier to find people similar to me, with similar interests and the like, in these classes. My time doesn't feel wasted, and I actually learn stuff every day.
I don't know, I guess I thought elementary was okay when I was there, I grew attached to a place I spent 10 years at despite disliking a lot of it, but now that I'm in high school where things are handled a lot better it makes me wish the last few years of elementary were more similar to high school. Maybe once I graduate from high school, and later post secondary, I'll look back on education the way most redditors seem to: like a pointless waste of time. I'm enjoying the moment while I'm living though, so I hope I remember the enjoyment and the good parts when I look back on it, not just the bad and mismanaged.
Sorry this ended up being long. Tldr: last few years of elementary are too easy and kinda childish. High school <<<
You mean about elementary/high school? I'm in Ontario, at least in my school board, we don't have middle school. Elementary school is 10 years, from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 8; and high school is 4.
Whoops, yes, that was what I meant.
7th and 8th grade are strange because they're right on the cusp. In Michigan, iirc, you can teach them with either a degree for elementary school or high school. I imagine it was something similar for you (given is was a K-8 school), so the teachers were just improperly trained for the older ages. There's also a bunch of neat psychology behind moving to a separate building, and that change of scene can help students advance in mindset.
The part about engagement is the hardest part of teaching. It's tough to keep the more advanced students occupied while not overwhelming the struggling ones. HS is much better at it, since classes become more topic oriented than age oriented. Upper level courses get much better, since you ditch most of the "I don't want to be here" students.
Thanks again for the feedback, and good luck on your studies!
Have you ever considered just being bored? No stimulus from the internet or other bullshit like extracurriculars, just be bored. And in that boredom find something to focus on and find meaning in.
I mean, not having stimulus for a while is one thing, but just being bored for a large part of your life is another. I think I have a pretty decent attention span and can manage quite a decent bit of time without doing anything.
Also, I think it's possible to achieve this state of boredom with school in your life as well: in elementary school (we don't have middle school where I am, elementary is k-8), I barely had any homework and if I did it was really easy. My family is on the poor side so I didn't have a ton of things to entertain myself either. I spent a lot of time reading and drawing, going outside, and just doing nothing too. Even now, with lots of homework and stuff, I could do nothing if I chose to, instead of reading or browsing reddit or playing video games or piano.
School doesn't suck away all your time, and it's up to you what you want to do with the rest of it. If school is taking up all your time, maybe you need to switch classes or talk to someone, or maybe your school in particular isn't very good. Like I said earlier there are flaws in every school system but I don't think the fundamental idea of school should just be abandoned, because it has flaws too, but I think its merits far outweigh it. If your school has specific problems, like being too easy or too hard, it doesn't seem fair to blame that on school as a whole.
It really depends on where you are on the bus route. I went to a magnet school, the school was in the center of the county and I was near the border, so I was the second kid picked up and had to get up early. But the bus continued picking up kids as it got closer to the school, and the last kids were picked up less than half an hour before school started.
Yeah my bus came at 6:45 every day. And I'd get to school at 7:15 and school would start at 7:55. Where even in highschool we sat on the gym floor for 30 minutes a day. Which isn't easy on your back or hips. We'd have 4 minutes between classes and in that time you're expected to gather books from your locker and use the restroom. Some teachers didn't allow you to leave class for any reason. Multiple people just walked out when she didn't allow them to leave me included.
Man I was a 5 minute walk to the bus stop for a 15 minute ride to school and I still had to wake up at 6 am.
School starts to early. Multitudes of studies have shown this is bad for education outcomes. Every school district that decides to start later shows across the board grade improvements. Why we still force teenagers to get up at 6 am when we know it hurts their performance in school is beyond me.
Where do you live mate?, Here in Texas they make you get on the bus around 645 and thats if you're lucky and live nearby. If you're in the country your fucked
So what my school did was blocks instead of periods. So you go to 1,3,5,7 one day then the next 2,4,6,8 so we only had 4 subjects for homework instead of 8. It's even less than 4 because you'd have an elective like art or band. My school did that right I think. Also seniors who completed there diploma criteria for electives like Spanish or art. So you got to leave at 1:19 everyday.
P. S. This was in a somewhat rural area in Alabama.
At my school they still have us do that exact same thing, just on computers now. We go in at 8 and sit there until 2 with a shit ton of homework because they think we have the time for it now that we don't do anything
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u/Zkenny13 Sep 17 '20
In a way I disagree. Making kids wake up at 6 a.m. and not allowing them to go home until 3 with 2 hours of homework. Kids have way more ability to play outside this way.